LibreOffice 4.2 Office Suite Boasts New Features, Performance Boost

The open-source LibreOffice 4.2 office suite was officially released by The Document Foundation on Jan. 30, providing users with incremental new features and improved performance. LibreOffice got its start in September 2010 after being forked from the open-source OpenOffice.org suite. OpenOffice had been a project originally run by Sun Microsystems and then Oracle, after Sun was acquired in 2009. LibreOffice enjoys the broad support of most of the leading Linux distributions and is often the default office suite on the Linux desktop. LibreOffice isn't just for Linux users though, as there are versions for both Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. The LibreOffice 4 product line was first released in February 2013 and is intended to be the first branch of LibreOffice that exists outside of the shadow of OpenOffice as an effort with its own direction and not just about fixing legacy code. As a fully featured office suite, LibreOffice includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities and has filters to import and export in myriad formats. In the LibreOffice 4.2 release, work has been done to improve those import/export filters, including better support for Microsoft document file formats as well as Apple's Keynote presentation format. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the features of the new LibreOffice 4.2 release.

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LibreOffice 4.2 Office Suite Boasts New Features, Performance Boost

By Sean Michael Kerner

LibreOffice Isn't Just for Linux

While LibreOffice is widely deployed on Linux systems, there are both Windows and Mac OS X installers, enabling users of proprietary operating systems to benefit from a freely available office suite.

LibreOffice Start Screen Gets a New Layout

One of the first and most visible things that users will see when running LibreOffice is the Start screen, which has been cleaned up in the 4.2 release. The Start screen provides easy access to the core applications within the LibreOffice suite. The new Start screen has a cleaner layout that makes better use of the available space.

New Icons Provide a Cleaner Look

LibreOffice 4.2 includes an updated set of icons throughout its application, improving the look and feel of the office suite.

Writer Now Has an Option for Character Borders

Among the incremental improvements in the Writer word processing application is the ability to place a border around a character.

Support for Microsoft Document File Formats Is Improved

With LibreOffice 4.2, users now have the ability to import and export as a Microsoft Word template (.dot) file.

Calc Gains New Statistics Features

The Calc spreadsheet application within LibreOffice 4.2 gains new statistics features, including sampling, correlation, covariance and moving average capabilities.

Random Number Generation Lands in LibreOffice 4.2

Data analysts sometimes have a need for random number generation capabilities, which are now included in Calc.

Impress Presentation Software Can Now Import Apple Keynote

The Impress presentation application within LibreOffice 4.2 now has the ability to handle presentations originally created in Apple's Keynote presentation software.